The place where the goat shows up in Passover seder today is actually a more recent addition to the Passover ritual, which is this song, Chad Gadya, One Little Goat, which comes at the end of the Passover seder. In English, [SINGING] "One little goat. One little goat. My father bought for two zuzim," and then there comes the cat that eats the goat, and then there's a dog that bites the cat, and then there's a stick that beats a dog, and it goes on like this, almost like a drinking song at the end of four cups of wine, at the end of the Seder. You know, it probably is just a drinking song, to be totally honest. I mean, that's probably the origin. But the most likely apocryphal explanation for why this song is there, is that this is actually a symbolic song about the Jewish people, where the Jewish people are, in effect, this scapegoat, this one little goat. When it says, My father bought this goat for two zuzim: zuzim are coins, the goat is the Jewish people, my father is God, and God has redeemed the Jewish people. The two coins are the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Then all of these animals and creatures and sticks, fire, water, all these things, the ox, the butcher... they represent different empires that conquered the land and the people of Israel up until the point when the song is written. So it's like, you know, and I'm gonna get this wrong, but it's like, you know, I think the cat is the Babylonians, and then the dog that bites the cat is the Persian Empire. There's the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Byzantines and the Islamic empires and the angel of death, actually, I think is supposed to be the Crusaders, because that's around the Middle Ages when this song was written, and there was these Crusader massacres of Jews. And then it says at the end that God will kill the angel of death. So that animates this story of the goat. And so I've always just been fascinated by this role of this goat in Jewish literature, this figure of this goat comes up all the time in Yiddish literature, there's, like, all kinds of stories about shenanigans involving goats. There's also a story by the Hebrew Nobel laureate Shai Agnon, it was actually one of the first stories I ever read in Hebrew, called Ma'aseh Ha'ez, it's The Fable of the Goat, and it's about this goat that appears in this shtetl in Poland and then travels through these tunnels from this shtetl in Poland to Tsfat, to Safed in the land of Israel. Horrible things happen when this child goes and follows the goat and then tries to bring his father back to the Promised Land with him. And there's actually a beautiful children's book about this in English now, it's called From Foe to Friend. It's a graphic novel that includes that story. But there's just something about this image of this goat who's taken all this blame and is carrying all this burden, but really has sort of accepted that, and whose strength is in his endurance. I've experienced this as a reader and seeing this figure of this goat that just keeps showing up over and over again in different aspects of Jewish literature, whether it's in religious literature, whether it's in songs and folk tales. I always felt this kind of kinship with this goat, because I sort of felt like, oh, this goat, it puts up with so much, but has all this integrity and dignity. And so that was how I created this character of One Little Goat in the book.